'Marionette Macbeth' gets tangled in its own strings

March 17, 2007|By Chris Jones, Tribune theater critic

Chicago Shakespeare Theater's "Marionette Macbeth" -- wherein the tale of the Thane of Cawdor is voiced by Chicago performers and visualized by more than 100 wooden, 3-foot Italian actors -- is a unique, ambitious and wholly admirable enterprise.

One only wishes that the work of the Milan-based Compagnia Marionettistica Carlo Colla e Figli, one of the world's leading marionette companies, was being shown off in Chicago to more powerful effect.

Part of the problem with this beautiful but strangely unaffecting presentation flows from the need to marry the traditional style of the Colla family (which has been a master of this game for more than 300 years) with Chicago Shakespeare's venue on Navy Pier. This is old-line, proscenium-based European puppeteering, in which invisible operators use a slew of controlling strings to manipulate multijointed marionettes of uniform scale. To put it more crudely, the effect is more like watching "Team America: World Police," or the classic British TV show "Thunderbirds," than, say, "Avenue Q," where operators and puppets fuse together in that now-familiar, post-modern way.

Here, the live actors sit at music stands at the front of the house, with their backs to the audience. This configuration work doesn't work well for a couple of reasons. It wastes space and pushes too much of the audience too far away from the puppets -- most people can't fully see the gorgeous details of the marionettes. And it seems to have disconnected the actors from the wooden bodies doing the physical acting.

Taken as a whole, I found the vocals and interpretation stentorian, inorganic and stiff (and I'm speaking of the voices, not the bodies). Except for the weird sisters and Lady M.'s famous nightgown routine (which are terrific), the voices don't fuse especially well with the puppets. It's as if these fine actors (the group includes Lisa Dodson, Neil Friedman and Martin Yurek, working under Kate Buckley's direction) went mostly into bombastic announcer mode when someone told them they were working with puppets. The verbal performances just don't come alive as they might. And on opening night, that (and the darkness in the house) sent several people near me to sleep.

That was a shame. The visual environments here are stunningly well drawn. And the little guys on the stage effect some spectacular scenes -- replete with horses, swordplay, gorgeous foliage and perfectly realized little kilts. Under the direction of Eugenio Monti Colla, the precision of the manipulation is extraordinary. And I suspect this production, which features an ebullient but sometimes overwhelming original score by Fabio Vacchi, will work better at the more suitable New Victory Theater in New York (it's moving there for a run in April).

Still, if you're a Chicago aficionado of this marionette form, you'll likely find the rewards exceed the limitations. And if only the actors would loosen up, speed up and bring this thing to more vibrant, humanistic life, this could be a fine, whimsical introduction to the play for a young person studying the text in school.